James Baldwin talks about how people consider black slang not as a language in his narrative called “If Black English Isn’t a Language Then Tell Me What Is?”. “What joins all languages, and all men, is the necessity to confront life, in order, not inconceivably, to outwit death: The price for this is the acceptance, and achievement, of one's temporal identity.” In this sentence the author explains that the languages many people achieve are not from just a desire to make a language but something one achieves through pain and suffering. The black people were taken from their families in Africa and sold as slaves. Africa has many countries and many languages making it hard for all the slaves to understand each other.
They had issues and problems when trying to communicate to each other. The only way out would be to have your own language where your people would understand. Black people made their slang language due to the circumstances of slavery; The Black church was a location in which the black people gathered and shared their language. Many people argue that the black language isn’t a language but just a dialect. But what makes a language as stated in his narrative is a situation where one experiences pain or…show more content… He cannot afford to understand it. This understanding would reveal to him too much about himself, and smash that mirror before which he has been frozen for so long.” What the author is trying to explain is that if the white race would know the things black people experienced than the white people will realize that they were the
